IMO, this is much easier with Wiki than Youtube. At least it generally cites sources so that you can verify that the source actually says what is claimed (and that it is a trusted source, of course).
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A form of cognitive bias all its own?
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A form of triage. As I recognize (or believe) that I am a finite being with limited time.
Gotta save time to consume more opinions on YouTube eh?
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The crux of the problem for me comes down to who it is that I am trusting. You can chase down resources and I do - but I prefer other encyclopedia’s for that, not wikipedia.
On youtube, when it comes to “news” (not hard scientific research), then I prefer individuals, not organizations. I can, over time learn about that individual and their motivations, philosophy, etc - I can build a profile of them and their biases (we all have them) in my mind, and I can then use that profile as a filter to understand the content they are giving.
With wikipedia, or any organization, building such a profile is very difficult as most of the time the people managing it are behind the opaque facade of the organization. Wikipedia especially so as thousands of different people edit there. Also the info on wikipedia can change frequently and easily without much (apparent) oversight by those who would actually know the truth of the matter. As is the case with the video I posted today regarding Dr. Malone.
But apples and oranges as well, as youtube and wikipedia are not used for the same thing. While I agree youtube may be used as a primary source if the video is of the event in question - most of it is opinion though and you have to track down the details yourself in most cases. Wikipedia though is largely used as a primary source by many even though it NEVER can be in truth.
I don’t understand what you are getting at. It seems like you are just trying to troll me. Is that right?
I don’t trust individuals or organizations, I trust data.
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Sure. But in a world full of information, how do you get it and process it? You must use internal filters of some sort right?
Test it. Consider the counterarguments, TRY to disprove it. When I have been sufficiently convinced that I cannot counter it, I trust it…yet still tentatively, pending new information.
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But there is so much data in the world every day. You’d have to be a god to witness enough yourself to test and prove to yourself any sort of truth right? So at some point if you want to have a bigger picture of the world, you have to enjoin with others to gather that data … And when you do that, then you need to try to learn the biases of these other people - if you don’t then you are flying blind it would seem.
Of course, so you have to pick your battles, accept your limitations (usually familiarity and personal expertise in the field), and recognize that everyone is ignorant of a great many things. And above all accept things tentatively. Obviously, some things you will become more certain of than others, but those tend to be things with gobs of data.
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You can see the edit history and who did which edits. You can also read the discussion to see why something has been removed and chime in if you think it’s shouldn’t be. Admittedly, if you want your arguments heard you may need to spend some time reading Wikipedia policies. If your viewpoint is sensible, you have the sources to back it up and your willing to spend the required time and effort, you can usually get through. There’s a lot of policies on what type of sources can be used and for what purpose, so it helps to get familiar with those.
Looking at the history and discussion on Wikipedia, I can see that the text about Robert Malone was removed by someone named Alex Brown. Apparently the problem with Malone is that patents and articles published by Malone are used to argue that he’s the inventor of mRNA vaccines. This is not allowed on Wikipedia. If the claim is to be included, it has to be referenced by other articles that provides an historical overview, but these doesn’t seem to support Malones involvement as particularly important.
If anyone has reliable sources that clearly describe Malones work as instrumental to the development of mRNA vaccines, that is written by scientists (not Malone himself) and published in a respected journal, I’m sure it would be included, but so far it doesn’t look like anyone’s been able to come up with that. So far it seems the claims that mRNA was invented by Malone is being touted by himself and associates. While he did work on this, concluding from the cited sources that he’s the inventor of mRNA vaccines would count as original research, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for Wikipedia in any case. More reliable independent sources would be needed to write this as a fact in Wikipedia, so far the main source for the claim that Malone is inventor of mRNA vaccines is his own website and social media profiles. There are many people who try to use Wikipedia to self promote and push agendas, so it’s for good reasons that such claims are not accepted.
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Yes, I know. I did that long ago. It takes far too much time for someone like me who studies very broadly. For those “specialists” that get into the serious weeds on specific topics and stay away from politics and political issues (hard these days), then that is a valid strategy I think.
It’s not worth the efforts especially as much of my study now ventures into economic issues - which are defacto political. That said, even issues in physics like the debate regarding AGW are highly political and controlled on wikipedia - not allowing dissenting views no matter the data - as when it comes to data, there are multiple sources and they will discredit your sources while elevating their own - and when challenged they’ll start pummeling you with logical fallacies. Which informs me that they are rotten at the core.
As I said in an earlier post all organizations have a hierarchy and wikipedia is no exception. Those at the top have their own fundamental biases and the whole of the structure will be structured around them. So venturing into those areas will get you burned.
I don’t know enough to debate the point specifically, but will point out that they didn’t change it until the controversy emerged - more than a coincidence and strong evidence of the bias of wikipedia’s manipulation of information. Further in many such instances they will simply spell out on the main page if there is contested info - they don’t always strip out the name entirely. If this were the only instance of this sort of thing happening, I wouldn’t worry about it … But it happens over and over again at wikipedia.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
You are a fool to think so IMO. I won’t use wikipedia anymore and I don’t think anyone sensible, to use your word, would either.
At the end of the day, trusting any organization is much harder than trusting individuals (that you can vet). So I will stick with individual as sources and do the research myself. There is no point in wikipedia when I can use any online encyclo - as I’m going to dig into the sources in any case. Mostly though I just use search engines and dig up all I need straight from the source papers.
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Cool. It’s great when humanity can repurpose things like this.
What do you do with a disused phone box? And can they help save lives? • Thanks to the Community Heartbeat Trust: https://www.communityheartbeat.org.uk/ • and the East of England Ambulance Service: https://www.eastamb.nhs.uk/ Automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, help save lives: but they need to be in an obvious, easy-to-access, public place that’s protected from the elements. Conveniently, it turns out there’s a disused red telephone box sitting in the middle of a lot of British villages
ReasonTV’s Nick Gillespie interviews Erik Voorhees
Erik Voorhees: Governments Can’t Stop Bitcoin 'Despite All Their Guns and Weapons’
The ShapeShift founder and early pioneer in the space talks about why bitcoin poses an existential threat to fiat money.
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Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has become standard practice on Wikipedia and is a bit unfortunate. Back in the early days of Wikipedia, if there was any issues with an edit, it would be fixed by others. Now if anyone does an edit has some issues, isn’t properly referenced etc, someone will most likely remove it rather than trying to fix it, even if it contains good parts. It’s left as a task to the original editor to add it back in a way that follows Wikipedias guidelines and many won’t to that. It can be a very frustrating experience for anyone who doesn’t edit Wikipedia a lot.
Anyone can become a Wikipedia editor, but its somewhat overly bureaucratic nature means it’s not always a friendly place for inexperienced editors and this drives many people away for sure.
While Wikipedia is biased, like anything else, I’d say though that on average it’s much less biased than your average blog or YouTube channel. It tends to gravitate towards a consensus that everyone agrees on.
If the truth about some subject isn’t established in reliable sources outside of Wikipedia, it can be difficult or impossible to get it included in Wikipedia until it has been established outside of it. Wikipedia isn’t the place for establishing the truth about some subject, but an overview of the different viewpoints that can be found in reliable sources. If all reliable sources are currently wrong, then Wikipedia will also likely be wrong until that changes. It’s not perfect, but as a repository of human knowledge, noone has come up with anything better as of yet.
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Fun useless fact - red phone boxes were all made at the Lion Foundry in Kirkintilloch, just to the north of Glasgow.
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OS taking down the cartels.
Would love to help out projects like this when we launch.
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MOXIE - Solving Climate Change? [2021]
With mankind’s uncertain future, this decade, removing CO2 from the atmosphere will be of the outmost necessity. To do this, we could use a technology that is being tested right now, on Mars. But what does our problem here, on earth, have anything to do with Mars
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Whitehouse: Inflation is not a problem, if you measure it in cheese.
Simulation confirmed. Computer… end program. Computer?
… no really, an actual tweet from the whitehouse
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